Capital punishment: why is it not morally and politically acceptable?

You give far to much credit to the thinking processes of the criminal mind. Sociopaths commit crimes because they have no concern for the rights of others or the laws of society. If you've talked to criminals outside the judicial system you find that their thought processes do not extend beyond the crime and the reason for the crime. Punishment is not an issue because they are certain they are too smart to be caught.

The death penalty should only be used when there is absolute certainty that the person to be executed committed the crime. That means DNA and other forensics that demonstrate guilt this http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/innocence-list-those-freed-death-row shows a list of well over 100 people on death row who've been proven innocent and released. Once convicted the evidence used should be reviewed by an independent body (say three universities reviewing separately) and if the scientific conclusions uphold the verdict then execution should occur within 12 months of the conviction. If the review does not demonstrate irrefutable proof then the maximum penalty should be life.

Death is certain. We cannot execute people unless we are certain.

 

You are right to object to executions in cases where the evidence is less that 100% proof against the killer.

People like John Gacie who trapped young boys in his basement cage and sadisrtically and methodically elicited fear and total submission are the people who we caught red handed, i.e, the actually blood on their hands and the shovel which he used to dig the graves under his concrete.

Nevertheless, only fools will remove the deterrent that has been proven to lower the number of murders in the nation.

 

How strange that when I cite the United States Declaration of Independence that it is somehow related ot the "feminist point of view" from the 1960's. There were no women that signed the Declaration of Independence and it established that the protection of the inalienable (unalienable) Rights of the People was the justification for government even existing.

The protection of the Rights of the People does, for pragmatic reasons, require an infringement upon those Rights but that infringement should always be the least possible infringement necessary to achieve the protection of the Rights of All from the violation by one. That is not a 1960's point of view but instead it's a point of view established by the Declaration of Independence and later addressed in the Bill of Rights where the 4th, 5th, 6th and 8th Amendments were exclusively about protecting the Rights of the accused in criminal cases. There isn't a single statement in the US Constitution that delegates any "Authority for Revenge" to the US government in the US Constitution.

Capital punishment is exclusively about revenge because it is absolutely unnecessary for the government to execute individuals in providing the protection of the Rights of the People.

 

The opposition to capital punishment goes back to colonial American and capital punishment was opposed by such noteables as Benjamin Rush, and Benjamin Franklin.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_to_capital_punishment_in_the_United_States#Colonial_period

Capital punishment violates the very ideals upon which America was founded which is the protections of the inalienable Rights of the People. As always the ideals of America are a goal and we've come to learn and overcome many violations of those ideal by our government during the last 200 plus years. Hopefully ending capital punishment in the United States will be the next step towards our ultimate goal of reaching the ideals upon which this nation was founded. We need to overcome the Neanderthal beliefs that justice and the protection of our Rights is in anyway related to revenge.

 

Yeah, but Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were feminist hippies from the 60s. They didn't understand group dynamics...

 

If you could describe for me the law that would ensure that 100% guilty murderers get executed when 95% guilty ones get life in prison, I'd love to listen.

I don't have the data to verify my suspicion, but I would hazard a guess that we execute about 10 "beyond a reasonable doubt death" row inmates for every one "no doubt in the world" types. And as the project innocence data shows, a frightening number of THOSE are, in fact, innocent.

 

Good points. To put this in a more legal perspective, the Bill of Rights provides many provisions that uphold the opposition to capital punishment. The 8th amendment protects against cruel and unusual punishment, which meets the standards for what is considered "cruel and unusual" established in Furman v. Georgia. The 9th amendment protects rights not enumerated in the Constitution. According to the Declaration of Independence, one of our inalienable rights that was not mentioned in the early Constitution is the right to life. Capital punishment is the deprival of such a right. Consequently, under the due process clause of the 14th amendment, all citizens are granted equal protection from cruel and unusual punishment under the law.

 

What many seem to think is that some people don't have inalienable Right and/or they are simply ignorant to what an inalienable Right is. While, for pragmatic reasons, we must infringe upon the inalienable Rights because people like Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dalmer, and Timothy McVeigh demonstrated that if we didn't infringe upon their inalienable Rights they would continue to violate ours we only need to protect ourselves from them. Life in prison without the possibility of parole provides that protection from individuals such as these. It is a pragmatic infringement. The death penalty is not a pragmatic infringement as it is completely unnecessary to protect society from even heinous criminals such as those mention (even Charlie who, in theory, could be paroled will never see the light of freedom again).

 

Why are you folks arguing about "capital punishment"?

The USA has spent the last 112 years killing millions of people around the world in almost non stop wars and aggressions.

Obviously most so called Americans believe in killing people of all sorts, good and bad, and they hate to follow America's Declaration of Independence that Mandates us:

“to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them,”

and to have “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind”

 

You might want to revise your statistics. If Americans followed this ideal to a "t", we would have never engaged in any war, including the Revolutionary War. In the name of decent respect of the opinions of Great Britain, should we have not taken up arms against them? There are times when war is justified.

 

Yes, the war with Britain was probably unnecessary. Taxes and bureaucratic hassles were increased after we were "free".

And, yes, wars of defense can be justified, but, even then, sometimes it is better to sacrifice for peace than to sacrifice more for war.

All of America's wars have been violations of America's True Purpose... and if it ain't all, its almost all.

 

I take it you are not an American citizen. I have never heard an American state that the war against Britain was unnecessary to any degree. Whether you are an American or not, please, explain your justification for opposing the Revolutionary War.

 

What was wrong about the American Revolution?



1. The colonies were mostly English & Germanic, so a revolution would be yet another bloody war against brothers as Europe had been long doing.

2. Americans could have sacrificed for peace instead of the great sacrifices they made for war.

3. After the Revolution when the Shay Regulators regulated their public servants in Massachusetts, the rich "patriots" in the other states raised an army to invade Massachusetts and kill the American Men asserting their American Rights, so the Revolution was just a scam by certain people who coveted what the English King had.

4. Taxes and bureaucratic hassles increased after the Revolution.

5. Revolutionaries attacked and pillaged people loyal to the king.

6. The Revolution was a setup all along. The organizers poisoned the King so that he would not oppose the stupid things done to prod the Americans into reactionary resistance and resentment.

7. The Treaty of Paris that ended the war required that the Americans pay all their debts to the King of England...... some freedom.

8. The people who fostered the Revolution promised the King & his successors to get back America, but in the process the kingdom was usurped from behind the scenes resulting in much trouble and misery ever since.

9. And, the real ideal behind many earnest people of the time was to make America into the Israel that was before they chose Samuel as a king.......an America where the American Man was in charge, doing Truth, Mercy & Faith, and his house was his castle, but they did not accomplish that. Just look around. Any American can be arrested & killed by his "public servants" today.

 

Provide proof in regards to #9.

Overall, most of your criticisms are purely moral and subjective. They are what you would have liked to have happened and your biased perspective on such events, not what actually did. For those points that are more substantive but I have no idea what you are talking about, you must provide proof. I have argued about these matters with others on these fora before, and many do not provide enough evidence to back up their claims. I hope for your sake that you can.

 

There is nothing inherently immoral about executing the incorrigible criminal, regardless of the felony in question. Society has a moral duty to do its best to rehabilitate those offenders who can be salvaged, but it also has a moral duty to execute those offenders who are incorrigible.

 

I'm unsure if your making a jab at American Police forces beating confessions or not. That doesn't happen, and when it does, a case is thrown out.

They made the choice to make their first hit. They could of chosen not to of made it, they chose to say yes when they could of said no.

I'm not sure how well versed you are in American history, since you're from NZ, but Prohibition failed, because people get their hands on their vices regardless of the laws in place, otherwise we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Actually, your "oil" destroys families when not moderated. My father and grandfather are both proof of this. They both drank and both of the families split up.

At the time, the evidence was enough to convince the juries of their guilt and deserving of the punishment. If the juries were wrong, it's not their fault, nor is it the government's fault, unless the "bad" evidence was purposely planted to indicate the guilt of the innocent party.

Drunk drivers, bad livers, suicidal teens, alcohol poisonings. Your lubricant kills more. The person harmed by smoking is the smoker. I live in a household of smokers, and the only ill effects I suffer is the occasional rude person mentioning that I smell like smoke.

You seem to be under the impression that every american gun owner is going to shoot somebody else. That simply isn't the case. If it was, our prisons would be chock full of people even more than they already are.

The key-words here being, "Law abiding" if you've been convicted of killing somebody, you are no longer considered "law-abiding" and thus are not allowed the same rights anymore.

It already is considered that Dagg, if you're a convicted felon, you aren't allowed to own a gun.

 

Sorry, you are wrong. Whether one is convicted of a crime or is a law-abiding citizen, the right to life is ever-present and must be protected under from cruel and unusual punishment via the 8th amendment in accordance with the 9th amendment, incorporated by the 14th amendment, namely the due process clause. The right to life is a natural right, and therefore is not eliminated when one becomes a criminal.

 

This and even outside of the constitution there is risk of killing an innocent person. We should not allow for that possibility. We only have one life, there is no after life, and no one should lose that one life because a kangaroo court railroads them right into a lethal injection.

 

In my view. Life inprisonment is much worse than the death penalty.

In the prisons, where they treat the prisoners like real scum. Hour a day excercise in a caged area. That sort of thing.

What a brutal existance that must be. With the pain of the prisoner knowing he will never be free.

 

It appears that neither you or I know what you are talking about then.

 

You certainly do not. I do understand recent court rulings that have incorporated the Second Amendment to apply to the states as well as have made gun ownership a right free of stipulations. In no way would this hinder a law that attempts to reaffirm the way the Second Amendment was employed in the early Republic, but with provisions to deal with gun control.

 

So does imprisonment and slavery if you want to be a purist about it.

 

But you say you need them to be armed in case, presumably, the military and National Guard are too ill-equipped to resist an attack by Cubans or Seychelles Islanders.

You say that is the policy intent of the 2nd Amendment.

 

That's why the Supreme Court came up with the two decisions that expanded the 2nd Amendment to apply to allowing housewives to arm themselves.

It recognised that American society is too dangerous to prohibit citizens from shooting one another on sight. It seemed to subscribe to the notion that more guns = fewer killings. I see that is not working out terribly well.

And anyway, that is a vast distortion of the 2nd Amendment, which applied specifically to "militias". How is one armed housewife a militia?

If the writers has wanted that, don't you think they would have made it plain? Instead, the Supreme Court decides, no doubt vastly influenced by the NRA and gun-lovers everywhere, to usurp Congress' sole right to make legislation.

 

Actually...I do consider one housewife a "militia" when she has a gun. Of course...a train cop or Army officer would be nice to take out a perp as said perp breaks through the door or window. But when that isn't possible the civilian- militia- home-owner-housewife is avail and on the ready.